Superheroes: A dilemma

[Scrib]

Given that I have ignored the New 52 in the hopes that it will eventually go away I can't rightfully comment on what Clark has recently been doing.
And I think you underestimate the serious emotional disconnect between robot/droid and biological being. You kill me, I'm dead. Yeah, okay, so I'll be back a year later at the latest, but for that year, I'm dead unless you get one of the Arcana guys to drag me out of whatever iteration of the afterlife they decided to park me in this time.
A robot? You have the means to rebuild the hardware, you have the latest backup of the software, it's essentially 'I knew we shouldn't have skipped the weekly backup.'

Are you speaking about the purely emotional reaction people have or are you making the rational argument that a robot doesn't count as a person/can't die?

[Batman]

I sort of thought the 'serious emotional disconnect' was something of a giveaway but yes, I was talking about the purely emotional reaction. I am however curious what rational argument you apparently think can be made for robots not counting as persons or being incapable of dying.

[Scrib]

I sort of thought the 'serious emotional disconnect' was something of a giveaway but yes, I was talking about the purely emotional reaction. I am however curious what rational argument you apparently think can be made for robots not counting as persons or being incapable of dying.

I don't know, anything I can think of seems to fall apart when I remember that humans have the same problem.

But given that the original poster was using the hypothetical to tease out (and possibly inconvenience)the positions of the people on the other side I'm not sure that just flat out claiming that people are irrational is a defense y'know?

[Simon_Jester]

We're boned if that way to keep him in check shows up later and he was killed, though- because then from their point of view Super-Jesus was killed for being super.

I guess the OP wants to give me the power to see the future too? Otherwise I'm not going to let that bother me.

So... you're not going to even worry about the possibility that if an unknown force gave one man superpowers, it might give another man similar powers in the future?

I'm suddenly picturing you as a Japanese guy after Hiroshima going "Thaaaaat can't possibly happen again!"

More seriously, it seems like basic common sense. If a seemingly impossible thing happens once, clearly my ideas about the possible and impossible were wrong. In which case it might very well happen again.

Once a thing has already happened, to say "it can't happen again," you must justify yourself pretty well. That takes much more detailed knowledge about what happened, and why, and what underlying combination of forces made it possible. We don't have such knowledge, so we can't rule out a recurrence that brings us a super-Jane Doe six months from now, to replace our John Smith.

Just so: Decision made sober; pull the trigger drunk because I'm weak.

If you're too "weak" to murder people sober, maybe you shouldn't be murdering people at all? Maybe you have actual morals, and are deciding for bizarro reasons to ignore them, which is probably not as good a choice as it sounds while your bizarro reasons are whispering in your ear?

I'm saying that we cannot prove that he is good, or is going to stay good (and his lack of accountability doesn't help this)and we have no counter to him if he was to turn bad so the potential for harm is enormous. Nor do I know enough about his psychology to make a judgement in his favor, and there's a reason people have all that social pressure on them. So the path for me is simply to get rid of him before we are completely at his mercy.

So if we try to parse this as a utilitarian thing, how does it work?

I mean, for me the decision works like...

W equals [(P)(X)] - [(1-P)(Y)] + (Z)

P is the probability of Smith being benevolent- maybe capricious, but benevolent and a positive force.
X is the amount of good Smith could do if he decides to be good.
Y is the amount of harm Smith could do if he decides to be bad.
1-P is the probability of Smith deciding to be a net negative force.
Z is an automatic weighting term for it being wrong to kill an innocent man.

Now, personally I think that P*X is very large, and while Y is also very large, the (1-P)*Y term is not so great that it obviously outweighs P*X.

At the same time, Z is large for me- I think that deciding to kill innocent people is bad, especially when you do not have specific, concrete reasons for doing so. Killing innocent people because you are suspicious of their moral character isn't just a bad thing... it's almost a cartoon example of "bad thing" we would use to demonstrate what a horrible person someone is.


It seems to me that Z is very small for you, much smaller than the other terms.

And that you're treating Y as effectively infinite, while X is some moderate-sized number.

And P seems to be almost zero for you- you don't seem to think the case of him staying benevolent is even worth considering.

Or put another way, you see the potential for harm Smith has as being so vast that it does not matter what else about him you know: the mere fact that he has such powers is enough to justify killing him, and all other factors are irrelevant.


Am I missing something?

OK. So your argument is that this is not a valid philosophical principle to use in general; it's only this guy who should be killed because we're not sure we'll be better off for having him around. Because he's too powerful, so if we can't be sure he's a good thing he should be preemptively eliminated.

Is that right?

It's not a generally applicable principle because the situation has never been encountered before and is unique.

Never in human history has a giant asteroid threatened to destroy the world.

But we can still arrive at general rules about what we should do, if that happened. You're confusing "precedent" with "general rule." General rules that tell us what to do about Superman are still general, and tell us something about our overall moral principles even when Superman isn't there.

I don't think he'll be uniformly loved. I do think that he'll get enough affection to satisfy the desires of almost any near-human psychology.

You forgot "healthy" and "reasonable". Of course, depending on how truthful he's being at his first meeting how near-human his psychology is can also be doubted.

Anyone who is so unhealthy and unreasonable that they would need more than the totally predictable admiration of billions for huge humanitarian deeds... That's inhuman. There are people like that; I'm using "human" in a very colloquial sense, I guess.

I don't expect that a superman would do no harm. But on balance, if all the evidence suggests he's no worse than average, and he's been given these immense abilities... I would expect net good and act on that basis.

Average by whose standards? And how are you judging that? A single speech to the UN followed by milquetoast attempts at reaching out? The total "net good" he would do depends on his position which I can't pin down with any certainty. Nor can I say how likely it is compared to the scenarios with "net bad".

If he does absolutely nothing in those three or four weeks of wait time, that's certainly strange and suspicious... but my impression is that the three or four weeks of time had not yet passed.

Suffice to say that I'm assuming John Smith is no better or worse than a typical person. And on that basis, I'm predicting that he would be a net positive, or at least a net neutral.

At the same time, I also think it's deeply wrong to kill innocent people because you personally have a strong fear of human nature.

The potential for abuse would be terrifying. History has not shown most individuals to have restraint to not abuse power once they are granted it. The saying "power corrupts" is a saying for a reason. While John smith may be an exception to that rule, the fact that he would be need to be an exception is enough to consider the risk too great.

Certainly you acknowledge that there is a greater than 0% chance he would turn out to be evil. For the sake of argument, would you grant that it there is at least a 1% chance that he might become a tyrant? Let's say John smith isn't a man, but a machine with equivalent powers. There is a 99% chance that this machine will solve everyone's problems and create a eutopia. And a 1% chance it will enslave mankind, or destroy the planet. And you've got the same choice here, you have 3 weeks to decide whether to destory this machine or let it attain ominpotency. Do you have such moral qualms then about destroying it?

I would not destroy the machine.

[Gaidin]

We're boned if that way to keep him in check shows up later and he was killed, though- because then from their point of view Super-Jesus was killed for being super.

I guess the OP wants to give me the power to see the future too? Otherwise I'm not going to let that bother me.

So... you're not going to even worry about the possibility that if an unknown force gave one man superpowers, it might give another man similar powers in the future?

I'm suddenly picturing you as a Japanese guy after Hiroshima going "Thaaaaat can't possibly happen again!"

More seriously, it seems like basic common sense. If a seemingly impossible thing happens once, clearly my ideas about the possible and impossible were wrong. In which case it might very well happen again.

Once a thing has already happened, to say "it can't happen again," you must justify yourself pretty well. That takes much more detailed knowledge about what happened, and why, and what underlying combination of forces made it possible. We don't have such knowledge, so we can't rule out a recurrence that brings us a super-Jane Doe six months from now, to replace our John Smith.

I've got no context other than the word omnipotent here. You want to convince the OP to give me the power to see the future so that I can see if something's going to join the world that can counter such a power in the future by all means. Smith ain't human on any level. I've got no reason to treat him as such. I've got every reason to be scared shitless of him because thirty days isn't enough time to have an idea what he's going to do a year, five years, ten years, fifty years, or a hundred years from now. He could very well enslave man kind in a benevolent, misguided effort to stop violence. Pick your unpredictable poison.

[Simon_Jester]

Personally, I'd actually be a lot more concerned that the world will soon be deluged with a plague of similar superheroes and supervillains. A more Watchmen-like environment where there is only one massively powerful being in the world strikes me as very unlikely.

So the more I think about it, the more I feel like we should be making policy on the assumption that what happened once may happen again. As I said, if you're a Japanese general looking at the ruins of Hiroshima, the one thing you do NOT want to say is "that can't happen again, laugh it off and move on!" It sucks when the authorities go into denial- as the inhabitants of Nagasaki learned.

The detonation of the first atom bomb meant the world had changed. Sensible people soon realized it wasn't going to change back to the way it was before.

[Gaidin]

That's not what the thread's about. The thread's about Smith. It has nothing to say about what's going to appear in the future and wants to know what I'm going to do with Smith. I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to deal with him and why. What may or may not appear in the future is too damn unpredictable. Find a dependable variable or get the OP to add the ability to see the future to my pathetic non-list of abilities.

[Grumman]

That's not what the thread's about.

Of course it is. Predicting possible future outcomes is the entire basis for your side's argument in favour of murdering an innocent man. You are being negligent by focusing entirely on one possible outcome and ignoring what has become a scientific fact.

Find a dependable variable or get the OP to add the ability to see the future to my pathetic non-list of abilities.

You don't need to be able to see the future. All you need is to do is comprehend a tautology: if people with superhuman powers can exist, people with superhuman powers can exist. If people with superhuman powers can exist, you are declaring that there can be no peace between you, and that there is nothing they can do to stop you wanting to murder them.

[Gaidin]

Yea and you want to talk about the functional difference between superpowers and what we might as well describe as omnipotent? Change the scenario where there's more than one and and tell me what those are and if any of them can match Superman-Manhattan and we'll talk.

[Scrib]

Hm, I'm pretty sure that I outright stated that he'd be the first and the last in the OP, to focus the issue, but I'm not sure how interesting that is. This path provides an argument that isn't just two irreconcilable differences in philosophy banging against each other. Hm...I'm torn *shrugs*

[Gaidin]

Him being the first and the last is the source of at least a few people pushing the button because once the means to kill him is gone there's no check and balance on him and he's literally god. If there's the potential to be a check and balance on him later you might have a few of those not push the button. If there's guaranteed to be a check and balance on him I'm willing to bet many more wouldn't push the button.

[TheHammer]

I think it boils down to whether or not you're an optimist or a pessimist. Anyone advocating for pushing the button aren't evil or immoral. They feel they are making the best choice in the grand scheme, while it certainly isn't something they take joy in.

[Grumman]

Hm, I'm pretty sure that I outright stated that he'd be the first and the last in the OP, to focus the issue, but I'm not sure how interesting that is.

You did, but you shouldn't have. You are suggesting that John Smith (the guy we know about) is a black box whose origin and motives are completely unknown, but also that we can know with 100% certainty that there aren't any other black boxes of unknown origin. That's just arse-backwards.

[TheGreekDollmaker]

Personally, I would push the button (activate the device, how ever you use the damn thing) immediately.

Now this is may be a bit far fetched, but I do think that the discussion of whether or not Super John will be good or evil or may pose a threat with his actions is where we should be starting from. Its mostly having to do with his existence as a whole. The fact that such a being with supreme intelligence, super strength, passing through walls what have you, may have a very radical change on how humanity views the world.

There are religion views, there are scientific views, and then there are the views of the common people. You have a guy that can do whatever Superman and Dr.Manhattan are capable of, I mean shit, this is the reason we read comic books and watch movies. I can't even predict what the reaction would be to something like that getting revealed.

[NeoGoomba]

"I don't know what peoples reactions will be" equals "kill him"?

Jesus this thread is fucking disturbing.

[The Romulan Republic]

Personally, I would push the button (activate the device, how ever you use the damn thing) immediately.

Now this is may be a bit far fetched, but I do think that the discussion of whether or not Super John will be good or evil or may pose a threat with his actions is where we should be starting from. Its mostly having to do with his existence as a whole. The fact that such a being with supreme intelligence, super strength, passing through walls what have you, may have a very radical change on how humanity views the world.

There are religion views, there are scientific views, and then there are the views of the common people. You have a guy that can do whatever Superman and Dr.Manhattan are capable of, I mean shit, this is the reason we read comic books and watch movies. I can't even predict what the reaction would be to something like that getting revealed.

God forbid peoples' views change.

Do you think the civil rights movement was a terrible mistake? Do you think the world would have been better if all the great philosophers and scientists had never been born?

[TheGreekDollmaker]

"I don't know what peoples reactions will be" equals "kill him"?

Jesus this thread is fucking disturbing.

I should probably apologize for that, reading what I wrote again it does come out as extremely disturbing. And I should also take back the comment about pushing the button and killing the guy. To be honest, I wouldn't know what I would do with such a device, and I probably shouldn't be involved with that.

It's not really "what people will think" that I was trying to get across, its that I think that even the existence of a being like that would be enough it at least affect humanity in some way, even before he can act.